Join in the discussion of having your own business and gaining freedom for your family. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/ en-us Homeschool Blogger Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:06:00 -0500 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:06:00 -0500 When you start a consulting business, an autoresponder is a great tool to help you create courses that promote your business. You already have a topic that you are an expert at because you are a consultant. The course that you design should deal with a specific topic within your area of expertise. You can offer the mini-course as a free bonus for visitors to your website. The autoresponder is the way you deliver the mini-course. After selecting a topic of interest, divide the topic up into several sub-topics. Give anyone that visits your consulting website a 5 or 7 day course where you cover each sub-topic on each day of the course. Day 1 should consist of an introductory message letting the reader know what will come next. The key is to build interest, clearly communicate your points and offer information of value so that the reader feels that he or she is getting quality actionable information. In the mini course you use when you start a consulting business, make sure you include the lesson number, topic title as well as information about your company. Conclude with a sneak peak of what the next lesson is about. A successful mini-course does a great job at building value in the minds of your potential clients. If your course fails to do this, those potential clients will never become actual clients. When you are designing the course, you can do so using a number of tools. One way you can do this is to create the entire course using a word processing or text-editing tool so you can store each lesson in one location. Once you have the entire course created, you will want to review it, edit it and then copy it over to your autoresponder. That is it! Your course is ready to be emailed out to all of your subscribers. As they receive each course lesson if you did a good job with the design they will feel like you are an expert in your area of expertise. Once they are ready to hire a consultant, they are going to call you and you will have clients to work with as you start a consulting business. __________________________ Copyright Stephen Beck, 2009 You have permission to reprint this article as long as you don't make any changes and include the bio below. Stephen Beck specializes in teaching others how to sell information products.  Get a free website traffic report at http://familyebiz.com/blog so your family can begin today. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/740705/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:06:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/740705/ An autoresponder can be a valuable time saving tool when promoting online business opportunities. The challenge is that most business owners simply do not know how to maximize autoresponders to their best use possible and as a result lose out on golden opportunities to generate more sales and work more efficiently. For instance, you can use an autoresponder by attaching a signature at the bottom of your emails. What this does is brands your message. It works just like business cards. In the signature you should include your name, the name of your company, contact information, and you send out a quick message. A signature should be included at the bottom of every email that you send out as part of your campaign. This is one of the best ways you can use this tool to promote your business. Each time you include your signature you are providing another exposure to your online business opportunities that makes your prospects more likely to do business with you. A signature also communicates a level of professionalism in your emails. When creating your signature, you want to make sure you keep it less than six lines and less than 70 characters on each line. You also want to make sure that the lines do not break up. The information that should be included in your signature is your name, the name of your company, contact email address, telephone number, and any additional contact information you want to include. The last step is to include a short message about the actual online business opportunities you are looking to market. When writing this message, it is important to remember that people only care about the benefits you offer that focus on them. You should include something in the PS section of your email signature similar to the following. A PS is a "by the way" message that you include at the bottom of your signature. Some people skip down to the PS.  It might be the only thing that someone reads, so it must be important. Make sure the PS is enticing. By utilizing these steps, you will be well on your way to maximizing the benefits of an autoresponder. A signature can be set up very quickly. Therefore, set yours up today and maximize the profitability of your online business opportunities. ________________________ Copyright Stephen Beck, 2009 You have permission to reprint this article as long as you don't make any changes and include the bio below. Stephen Beck helps families start a consulting business. Pick up his three free videos at http://www.8WeeksToProfits.com so your family can start today. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/740114/ Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:59:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/740114/ If you are struggling to make money on the internet, there are several reasons why this might be the case. The challenge is you may not know what the issue is so you do not know how to fix it. Today, I will reveal several areas that might be limiting success in your business. The first challenge is a lack of a product or service to market. One of the best types of products to market is an information product because selling information works very well online. The second area that a lot of people struggle with when they attempt to make money on the internet is exposure. Marketing outside of where you are located can be challenging. This is especially true if you are marketing a service that does not work well for a national audience. As an example, there is not a huge demand for an attorney outside of the city he or she practices in. You need to have people you can market to in order to make money. While quantity is great you cannot make money without quality as well. The people who see your website actually need to be interested in what you have to offer. When I used to work in the remodeling business there were plenty of times that I would talk to someone who sounded interested over the phone and then when I got to their house they were no longer interested. This is a major waste of your time and money so you need to have the right people coming to you. Another mistake that makes it hard to make money on the internet is not catching the attention of good prospects for your business. When marketing online you are going to need something more than what you will typically use to market to people offline. If the service you market is complicated you need a strategy to get an appointment first. You are not going to sell financial services, real estate, medical services or legal services online without an appointment. Your strategy should be to use the internet to get potential prospects to book a one-on-one appointment with you where you can sell your services in person. The final limitation to income online is not giving the prospect a reason to buy now. People online have short attention spans and if you do not give them a reason to buy from you right this minute they will not buy from you and will most likely not buy from you in the future. The key to making money online is to identify and eliminate these common mistakes. If you are able to do this you will crack the code and you will make money on the internet. ________________________ Copyright Stephen Beck, 2009 You have permission to reprint this article as long as you don't make any change and include the bio below. Stephen Beck teaches people to start a home internet business. Get his 3 free videos at http://www.8WeeksToProfits.com so you can begin today. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/739855/ Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:10:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/739855/ When promoting work from home opportunities using sales pages, you need to be sure you effectively use bullet points. Bullet points help you to craft your offer in a way that is appealing for your website visitors. These are some tips that will help you to effectively use bullet points so that your website will get the maximum response. * Help your reader to connect the key points. Many people on the internet skim rather than read. You want to show these people why your offer benefits them. Your opportunity may help them make more money, enjoy more free time or become a better person. By drafting well-positioned bullet points, you answer the question in the mind of your prospect, "What is in it for me?" Answering that question will produce a better response. For example, if you are promoting work from home opportunities that are based on eBay, the bullet points that you use should demonstrate some of the advantages of working on eBay, such as leveraging a proven brand, having a place to get customers from and so on. These points are what sell your prospect. * Never promote two separate opportunities at the same time, such as a weight loss opportunity and a personal development opportunity. This confuses most readers and will result in poor responses. Your only goal is simply to get the person to become a lead so you can follow up later. * The most important sale that you make when promoting business opportunities is selling the web site visitor on why he or she should give you his or her name, email address and other contact information. Most people are simply not going to decide to join your business opportunity from a single webpage. By selling them on giving their contact information you can follow up with them later. * Make sure you do not confuse your website visitors with distracting ideas. If you want your prospect to opt-in, then that is what you should be communicating in your bullet points and on your webpage. Having banner ads and other links keep the visitor from doing what you want him or her to do. * Highlight the biggest specific benefits as opposed to general information about your work from home opportunities. The biggest specific benefits are generally what are going to convince the website visitor to move forward, not the general details that nobody cares about. * The job of the bullet point is to get the reader to continue reading. * One of the best tips I give when working with my clients is to help them to generate curiosity in the minds of their prospects. For example, if you are promoting a business opportunity that is experiencing rapid growth, you can say something to the effect of, "Discover the hottest business opportunity that is currently growing XX% just over the last six months." What you are doing here is you are building curiosity and you are piquing interest in the mind of the prospect. Now they are going to want to know what business opportunity you are promoting. The bottom line is you want to make the prospect interested in what you have to offer. If you are not getting the response you expect from your sales page, try implementing some of these tips. You will get a better response for your work from home opportunities. _______________________ Copyright Stephen Beck, 2009 You have permission to reprint this article as long as you don't make any changes and include the bio below. Stephen Beck teaches families to find work from home opportunities. Go grab his 3 free videos at http://www.8WeeksToProfits.com so your family can begin today. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/739379/ Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:22:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/739379/ Previously, I explained about the various options at your disposal to protect your products when you sell information. Using a membership website that requires password authentication is one way to do this. You also have the option to use PDF software protection. The choice is yours. To find pdf protection software, do a search for either pdf protection or ebook protection to find different options. I personally believe that investing in this type of software is a wasted investment. The reason why is because your money and time is better invested in finding ways to sell more copies of your ebook than stopping people from trying to download your ebook for free. The money you spend on that type of software can be better spent on directing traffic to your website. Creating new products is a better way to spend your business building time. A membership site is a much better way to protect your information. In my business model I start out by offering a $27 ebook to get the customer to do business with me. Those that buy the ebook are then introduced to my monthly audio program, for which I charge $19.97 a month. Doing this gives me control as to the quality of prospect that sees my monthly program because only paying customers are learning about it. In addition to that, I also have a gold membership that I offer for more money. This gold membership gives me the revenues that I need to cover the cost of my membership site application, known as AMember. AMember allows me to control who gets access to my website. Trying to stop people from sharing a $27 ebook is a waste of my time and effort. Besides I can stop most of the people for free. All I do is tell them in the ebook that the product is not free and that if they receive it for free they should do the right thing and delete it and that works well for me. As for my monthly audio website program, my AMember software does the job. Having access to this type of program for a membership site or a physical or digital product is a great form of protection because everyone has to have account information in order to use it. This is why I go with this option as opposed to going with an ebook protector. _____________________________ Copyright Stephen Beck, 2009 You have permission to reprint this article as long as you don't make any changes and include the bio below. Stephen Beck enjoys teaching people how to start a home internet business. Get his three free videos at http://www.8WeekstoProfits.com so you can start as soon as possible. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/737766/ Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:11:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/737766/ When you sell information online in ebook format, can you stop people from sharing it? You can limit sharing using Clickbank as a payment option. Clickbank provides some measure of protection. How does it work? The first step is to create a sales page for your product. A customer clicks on the buy link and Clickbank allows them to enter their credit card information. If the information is valid, Clickbank sends the customer your download page. If the payment is not valid, Clickbank will not send the customer your download page. As a result, a customer can only access your page if they provide a valid form of payment. However, once a customer has that link, he or she can download your product and share it with everyone. How do you protect yourself even after payment has been received? If you are looking for a way to protect your products when you sell information online, one way to do so is by using a membership website with a password. What you do is place the information you want to offer on a webpage instead of in ebook format. For example, on my website, they have to use their user name and password and their account is linked to their payment information. When you sell a $700 course with a $97 per month membership subscription, protecting your information is important. You do not want that type of information being shared. I do not care as much if I am selling a $27 ebook. With most products, especially in niches where the buyer tends to be more honest, sharing is not a major issue. One technique to limit sharing is to use the honor system by reminding your readers at the beginning of the ebook that it is not free and giving them a way to report violators who choose to share the ebook without permission. Many people who read such a statement will abide by it. They do not want to be considered thieves and will abide by your request. Simply put, unless you protect the information itself and not just at the point of payment, customers can share your information with anyone that they want to share it with when you sell information online. _________________________ Copyright Stephen Beck, 2009 You have permission to reprint this article as long as you don't make any changes and include the bio below. Stephen Beck shows people how to sell information. Pick up Stephen's three complimentary videos at http://www.8WeekstoProfits.com so you can begin today. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/737407/ Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:43:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/737407/ As someone who participates in selling information, I have encountered many people who ask for my products for free. How do I recommend you handle this? If they are friends and family you can make that decision for yourself. If you are doing a special promotion where you are giving your product away for free that is a different situation. In this scenario I am referring to people that you do not know that contact you randomly and ask if you can give them your product at no cost. I get this request frequently. A person that I do not even know will contact me out of the blue and they will ask me if I would be willing to give them a copy of my product for free to help them out. What these people fail to realize is that this is not an appropriate request. If they owned a traditional business they would balk at someone walking into their store and asking for their products for free. Why they feel they can do the same to me is beyond comprehension in my opinion. Besides, more importantly what they do not realize is that part of the value from the product comes in paying for it. If you look on my hard drive on my computer you will find a number of ebooks that I have never read. Do you know why? It is because the creators of these ebooks were not selling information, they were giving it away for free. If I had to pay for that information I would have placed a higher urgency and priority on it. Since I got it for free, there was no sense or urgency. I can go on and on about this topic because it literally happens to me on a daily basis. I have even had people tell me, ?Hey if you let me try your product out for free as soon as I apply the information and make money from it I will pay you.? You and I ALL know this will never happen. It is not like the person is dishonest. The person has no value attached to the product and therefore has no urgency to make it work effectively. As a result, they will never make any money from the information and will never pay me as a result. I would be giving away free products without ever making any money if I agreed to that scenario for everybody. I need to make money to support my family as well and the way I choose to do this is by selling information that I have benefited from. I spend time and money creating these products. Therefore people need to invest in them in order to benefit from them. Think about my business model. People online constantly are looking to learn how to make money online. They want to know the meat and potatoes. They want step-by-step instructions. This is why I do well online. I use step-by-step videos to show them exactly how to make money online. If you follow what I do and you also make sure you go through all of the details, as opposed to highlighting concepts, you will also do well when you are selling information online. __________________________ Copyright Stephen Beck, 2009 You have permission to reprint this article as long as you don't make any changes and include the bio below. Stephen Beck enjoys teaching people how to sell information online. Check out his three free videos at http://8WeekstoProfits.com so you can begin as soon as possible. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/736467/ Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:20:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/736467/ There are a number of key elements to getting prospects on business webinars to take action. It involves developing a system that makes taking action in their best interest. Regardless of whether you use offline or online marketing and whether you work with a service, a physical product or a digital product, creating urgency for action is important. Creating a sense of loss for inaction is equally as important. Scarcity is one of the best techniques for driving action. One way to create it on a webinar is to create a time limit offer such as "only available until 3:00pm tomorrow." Offering a time limit bonus is also a way you can do it. Both of these techniques create a reason why the prospect should buy now. Without them, the prospect will procrastinate on making a buying decision. Another powerful technique to use on business webinars is limited supply. You can say "I only have 200 of these available." In order for this to work you need to have a compelling reason that makes sense. For instance saying "I can only sell 200 ebooks otherwise if I sell more my computer will overload" is silly. If you are looking for ways to create limits on product quantity, here are two ways you can do this. Say you offer consulting services. You can limit the number of hours you offer because time is a limited resource. If you are offering a physical workshop, you can use the limited amount of seats. The place you are holding the workshop has limited capacity. If you are selling a product that has to be produced, you can create a limited first run, like only 100 so if they want to get in on that run, they have to buy now before you run out. When it comes down to quantity limitations, there are several ways you can do this. One way is to promote the power of the information by saying "I need to limit the amount of these courses because if the information gets into too many hands it will hurt all of us." Now your potential buyers feel like they are in an exclusive club. Another technique for increasing the amount of buyers on your business webinars is fear of loss. If you present a takeaway, you will convert serious prospects who may be on the fence. One way is to offer a fast action bonus. You can say "I will also send my XYZ program for free to the first 100 buyers." With these examples, you should see why it is so important to provide a reason for your prospects to buy from you now. You also should have a consequence if they buy later. The most common one that is that the price goes up. You can also make the product not available at all our take components of the product out. Whatever you do, they need to understand what they do not get by waiting. This is why you want to create live events in your marketing. When you have events like business webinars there is a built in urgency because of the limited amount of participants that can join. A live event in person is limited by the amount of space available. You can even use an event in your life to create an event in your business. One technique some business owners use is the employer/employee event. The employer is "away on vacation" and the employees offer a special discount on the product for a set amount of time, which coincides with the return of the employer from vacation. Once the time passes, the special discount no longer applies. What this does is creates urgency and a fear of loss in the minds of your prospects. This event can even be promoted on business webinars that you host for your prospects. The bottom line is if you want to maximize your conversion rates you need to implement plans to do so. By creating a sense of urgency and a fear of loss you motivate people who might have otherwise put it off to do business with you. __________________________ Copyright Stephen Beck, 2009 You have permission to reprint this article as long as you don't make any changes and include the bio below. Stephen Beck shows families how to make profits online with through a webinar service. Get his free online business information at http://www.WildlyWealthyWebinars.com so your family can start using right away. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/734747/ Fri, 9 Oct 2009 15:15:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/734747/ There is a powerful tool that you can use to promote your business. It is known as a business webinar. Webinars are like meetings that take place online. It is a very effective strategy to increasing your income, generating more customers and making more money. It is a powerful way to dominate the niche that your business participates in. A number of other businesses have utilized them with massive success. Both offline and online business are using webinars. Video is here to stay. A webinar is really just controlled television. It gives people information in the way they are used to finding it, which is on the television. The powerful thing about webinars is that you can sell one to many, instead of selling one to one. That is a key part of webinars. This also frees up your time to do more of what you enjoy. Think about how great it would be for you to use a business webinar to segment your prospects so that you focus your marketing dollars on prospects targeted because they attended the webinar. It is one of the best ways you can prequalify the prospects you target for your products and services. When you host a business webinar, you can talk to 100 people, 500 people or even 1000 people. It does not matter where they are located. Your webinar can be conducted all over the world. It really allows you to focus your marketing efforts on people who are most interested in your niche. Another major benefit that a business webinar provides is the ability to grab the attention of your prospects and create a sense of urgency. It is very interactive. By utilizing webinars, you can cause your prospect to take action immediately instead of waiting days, weeks or months to do business with you. Utilizing a business webinar is a great marketing tool that many people simply do not maximize to their advantage. I know what it has done for my business and I believe it can do the same for yours. ______________________ Copyright Stephen Beck, 2009 You have permission to reprint this article as long as you don't make any changes and include the bio below. Stephen Beck teaches families how to make profits online with a webinar service. Go get his free online business information at http://www.WildlyWealthyWebinars.com so your family can start right away. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/734109/ Wed, 7 Oct 2009 14:12:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/734109/ Girls, Get Up & Go! is back up and running. You can grab your package right here: http://tinyurl.com/octobergirls . http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/733922/ Tue, 6 Oct 2009 23:28:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/FamilyBusiness/733922/